Volkswagen had painted a bulls-eye on Toyota and wanted to beat the Japanese by 2018. At least in terms of production numbers, Volkswagen will have Toyota beat this year. Instead, VW has to contend with GM.

The long-term new energy strategy of Volkswagen and Toyota on the other hand could have been devised in a joint planning session. Volkswagen believes that near-term, the plug-in-hybrid has a great future, whereas Volkswagen’s CEO Martin Winterkorn won’t live long enough to witness the boom of the pure electric car.

“I cannot imagine that the whole fleet will run on pure electric power in the foreseeable future. A current technology lithium-ion battery weighs 250 kilograms, and in the best case, it will take you 150 kilometers down the road. Maybe this can be optimized a little, but I expect significant progress only from the next generation of batteries. From our current perspective, this could be based on lithium-sulfur. This battery could be good for 300 kilometers.

A decisive technology leap could be lithium-oxygen batteries. This is a topic that still needs a lot of research. With this technology, a car could have a pure electric range of 450 to 600 km. That would be the breakthrough.

But I don’t expect it before 2030. It won’t happen in my life – at least not in my life as CEO of Volkswagen.”

Winterkorn on plug-in-hybrids:

„The bridge to the future will be the plug-in-hybrids. You can charge their battery from a wall socket. You can drive 50 or 6o kilometers on electric power, then, an efficient internal combustion engine powers the car. Right now a gasoline engine, at some point in time a diesel.

That way, the battery can be down to two thirds of both the weight and the price of a pure EV. Don’t forget, the battery of a pure EV alone costs €8,000 to €10,000. Together with Bosch, we want to reduce the price of the battery to € 5.000, but that is still a lot of money. A battery for plug-in-hybrids runs us only €3,000 today.”

Interesting: Winterkorn didn’t mention hydrogen at all. Volkswagen used to be gung-ho on hydrogen.

I think Winterkorn is mistaken in saying that it’s the battery capacity that’s the limiting factor of electric cars – it’s the recharging time. Even with their low ranges, electric cars would be viable today if they could be charged in 5 minutes.

By way of example, living in central London I park my car on the street and don’t drive to work so unless the council installs charging points at every parking space, there’s no way I could charge an electric car on a regular basis.

Not sure how a Diesel-Electric hybrid would ever make sense. The less fuel you use, the longer it takes to pay off the diesel engine price premium. Also, on the way to work 87 octane gasoline was $3.039/gallon vs. $3.729/gallon for diesel.

While charging time is a fundamental limitation on pure EV utility, the ultimate limit to mainstream use of both hybrids and EVs in the high cost and number of charge/discharge cycles with acceptable capacity for the batteries. The typical internal combustion engine now outlasts the paint and interior plastic without much lost performance, but batteries get “soft” relatively quickly.

Most modern small turbo-diesel engines, despite giving a lot of power (mostly torque) for it’s size and fuel consumption, have a quite narrow powerband. In my eyes this makes them perfect for a generator. All though I hate diesel cars, a diesel-hybrid makes sense.